Daily Independent (Lagos)
Y. Z. Yau
3 July 2009
analysis
Lagos — This morning, family members, friends, comrades, colleagues and admirers of the late pan-African icon, Dr. Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, will gather in Abuja to mark the 40th day of his death with a variety of events wound around a symposium on the theme, 'Don't Agonise, Organise! The life of Dr. Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, 1961-2009, and Pan-Africanism.
The Abuja symposium is only one of the many such events taking place across the world to pay tribute and respect to this towering giant who gave so much of his life to the search for and the propagation of pan-African ideals.
In London alone, three of such events are taking place. In Africa, events are planned across Nairobi, Kampala, Accra and in several other cities. In South Africa, a one-day workshop at Tshawne University of Technology, Pretoria is taking place under theme: "Revisiting Pan-Africanism in the 21st Century: A Tribute to Tajudeen". Over the last few weeks since his death in a suspicious circumstance, memorial committees have been springing up virtually everywhere in Africa, working to rekindle the fire in pan-African solidarity and transformational politics.
Why has Taju become such a phenomenon? The simple reason is that he represented the best that all patriotic Africans wish Africa to be. His unflinching faith in the ability of Africa and Africans to triumph was so infectious that you could not come across him and fail to believe in the inevitability of Africa transcending its present status of the backyard of history.
He believed in the wresting of political power from the hands of the people's oppressors but he could only conceptualize such rescue of power through the self agency of the people for transformation. For this reason, he was ready to work with all kinds of people and organizations that share the irreducible minimum. He believed that working with the people was the best way to engender change and not mere preaching to governments. In this, he did not make the artificial distinction between political and apolitical organizations, for he believed that in every organization, whether explicitly political or not, there was something positive it could contribute. This belief in the seeds of transformative engagement in each and every organization drove him into ever increasing involvement with an incredible number of organizations that left him with very little time for personal comfort.
Organizational disappointments were never for him a thing to stop from trying. Thus he kept his faith in the ability of all compatriots to overcome their weaknesses in the service of the nobler cause. He never tired of working with others to continuously found a growing number of organizations that would make their contributions to African liberation.
He did not believe in the sectarian hues of many who shared his ideological stand. Instead, he was seeking for larger and bigger platforms that would pull the various human agencies. Thus he craved for ever more inclusive platforms, working with many organizations, some of which individually would appear contradictory. For him each of these organizations had something to contribute to the struggle.
He was happy to support every cause of justice in Africa, organizing against gender injustice, supporting environmental campaigns, minority rights, democracy and the fight against poverty. He was however not sold to the post-modernist trash of single-issue politics. For him each plank of the struggle was a necessary component of the wider efforts at transforming Africa, anchored in social justice.
As a pan-Africanist, his nationalist credentials were beyond doubt, but his was not the blind the nationalism that sees his country on the top of the hierarchy of loyalties. Africa remained the centrepiece of his thoughts and actions, even as he was deeply engaged in the Nigerian project.
Taju was an enigma of sorts. He was a scholar who did not hide in the ivory tower. He believed scholarship must be at the service of the people and driven by the quest for social justice. He never allowed his intellect to be put in the service of oppressive and undemocratic governments. Perhaps it was this concern about the misuse of the intellect that made Taju to avoid the academia for which he was by training prepared.
The Abuja symposium is aimed at providing a panoramic portrait of Taju as he lived, with the hope of distilling lessons from it for the wider public. The first session would be a family reflection with the sub-theme Family, Faith and Culture. Malam Shehu Aliyu, a classmate of Taju at Government Secondary School Funtua as well as at Bayero University, Kano would provide the early insights in the life of Taju. He would be assisted by Mallam Shuaibu Shehu who is not only a close relation of Taju but also one who had for years worked closely with him at the level of the Pan-African Development Education Advocacy Project (PADEAP), a pan-African organization that Taju and his associates set up first in London and later with presence in different African countries, and most fittingly, rooted in Funtua, his birthplace and final resting place, where it has been in the advocacy among other things, on maternal health. No doubt this choice of engagement for PADEAP itself was vintage Taju in expressing his concrete commitment to the existential struggle of women as they confront shameful waste of our mothers through maternal mortality.
This is to be followed by a panel on Human Asset Development. The speakers on the panel include Otive Igbuzor, Adhiambo Odaga and the Principal of Hauwa College, Funtua, the school that was established by Taju himself as part of his overriding commitment to human capital development.
A third panel is on Pan-Africanism to be led by Nana Busia Jr., Okello Oculi, Napoleon Abdulai, Afi Yakubu and Fatoumata Toure, all of them pan-Africanists, at home in various African countries. Prof. Okello Oculi for example, a Ugandan, has spent most of his time in Nigeria which he has made his home. Napoleon is the pan-African nomad who has lived and worked in virtually all the regions of Africa.
The final panel which seeks to weave the various engagements of Taju into a political perspective is on Citizenship, Politics and Social Justice. The panelists are Jibrin Ibrahim, Y. Z Ya'u and Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi, all of whom are long time personal and political friends of Taju.
The event will be given a pep-up with a special poetry reading by Odia Ofeimun. Like Odia's poetry, Taju's life was a pep-up for us, and in this suffocating national catharsis, it should provide us with a sense of deep reflection in the effort to rescue our politics from the cul de sac of visionless entrapment that is all too characteristic of much of Africa today.
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